Chapter 31
LEVI
Dad disappeared.
One moment he was sitting at the head of the war room table, pale and shaking after saying Victoria's name. The next, he was gone—slipping out through a side door while the rest of us were still processing.
The room fell into tense silence.
"Well," Atlas said finally. "That was ominous."
Caleb leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "Anyone know who Victoria is?"
Heads shook around the table.
"Dad's never mentioned her," Charlie said. "Not once."
"Yeah," Silas added. "Whatever this is, it predates Dominion Hall."
I thought about the woman's voice in the dark. The way she'd spoken about my father like she owned him. Like she'd been waiting decades for this moment.
"She said he was one of theirs," I said. "That he built Dominion Hall on the bones of her operation."
"Revenge, then," Noah said quietly. "Personal revenge."
The words settled heavy in the room.
Gideon spoke up. "So, what do we do? Wait for him to come back? Go looking?"
"We wait," Ethan said. His voice carried that particular weight of command—the kind that came from years of leading men into bad situations and bringing most of them back. "He'll tell us when he's ready."
We waited.
Five minutes stretched into ten. The Charleston Danes pulled up files on their laptops, cross-referencing names and operations. My Montana brothers sat in that particular stillness soldiers learned—alert but patient, ready to move the second the order came.
When Dad finally returned, he looked different.
Grim. Determined. Like he'd walked into the past and dragged something heavy back with him.
"Had to call in a favor, but I know where she is," he said simply.
The room shifted. Every man straightening, leaning forward.
"It's time to suit up," Dad continued.
It was like watching him step back into uniform. No one ran. No one shouted. Everyone took the news calmly—a call to war that we'd all been trained for, in different ways, in different wars.
Atlas stood first. "Caleb, take him to the armory."
The armory was exactly what I should've expected from Dominion Hall.
A converted basement room, climate-controlled, with racks of weapons lining the walls. Rifles. Pistols. Shotguns. Gear organized with military precision.
"Pick what you're comfortable with," Caleb said.
I went straight for the shotguns. Close-range work. The kind where you wanted stopping power and didn't have time for precision at distance.
I selected a Benelli M4, checked the action, loaded it with 00 buckshot. Nine pellets per shell, each one the size of a .32 caliber round. At close range, it would drop a man before he knew what hit him.
The others had already selected their gear.
Unlike the movies, we weren't going in black tactical gear with night vision and infrared lasers.
We were in normal clothes—jeans, boots, jackets to hide the body armor we strapped on underneath.
Steel-eyed and ready, but looking like we could blend into any neighborhood in America.
Because that was exactly where we were going.
We left Dominion Hall in a small convoy.
Four SUVs, engines purring, GPS coordinates already loaded. Thirty-three minutes away. As we drove, the plan came together over the radio.
Full cordon. Montana Danes through the front. Charleston Danes from the back.
Elias had provided imaging—satellite, street view, property records. The target wasn't remote. It was a stately home in a neighborhood of stately homes. Old money. Quiet streets. The kind of place where neighbors noticed unusual activity.
"We go in with federal badges," Atlas said over the comms. "In case anyone gets curious. Today we’re DEA."
"Might get away without firing a shot," Silas added.
"Or not," Ryker said flatly.
I gripped the shotgun, running through scenarios in my head. Entry points. Fields of fire. Rules of engagement when you couldn't be sure who was a threat and who was just staff.
The approach was easy.
We parked two blocks out, converged on foot. The neighborhood was quiet—streetlights casting long shadows, houses dark except for the occasional porch light.
The target house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. Two stories. Colonial style. Lights on inside, shadows moving behind curtains.
We hit the sidewalk in front of the house.
That's when the shadows inside scattered.
"They made us," Jacob hissed.
"Go, go, go!" Atlas's voice crackled over the radio.
No time to lose.
We moved as one—Montana Danes surging toward the front, Charleston Danes peeling off toward the back.
My brothers looked to me. Ethan hefted the entry hammer.
I nodded.
The door crashed inward with a sound like muted thunder. We poured through the opening, shotguns up, moving in a tight stack.
The entryway was marble and hardwood, a chandelier overhead casting fractured light. A man appeared at the top of the stairs, raising a pistol.
I fired.
The shotgun roared twice. The man jerked backward, blood spraying across the wallpaper, and tumbled down the stairs.
"One down, front stairs," I called over the radio.
"Clear left!" Caleb shouted, sweeping into the dining room.
"Clear right!" Jacob echoed from the sitting room.
We moved deeper into the house, methodical and brutal.
A man burst from a side hallway, submachine gun in hand. Lucas took him with two quick shots, center mass. The man dropped like his strings had been cut.
"Two down, east hallway," Lucas announced.
Gunfire erupted from the back of the house—the Charleston Danes engaging targets.
"Three down, kitchen!" Silas's voice over the comms.
"Four down, back entrance!" Marcus added.
We pushed forward, room by room, angle by angle.
The house was a maze—hallways branching off, doors opening into sitting rooms and libraries and spaces I didn't have time to identify. But we'd done this before. Different houses, different continents, same brutal calculus.
Move. Clear. Confirm.
Another man appeared at the far end of the hallway, raising a rifle. Gideon and I fired simultaneously. The man's chest exploded in a spray of red, and he crumpled.
"Five down, second floor hallway," Gideon called.
I reloaded as we moved, shotgun shells hitting the floor with metallic clinks.
A door to my left burst open. A woman—no, a target—with a pistol. I pivoted, fired. She went down hard, pistol clattering across the hardwood.
"Six down, bedroom," I said.
We reached the back of the house, linking up with the Charleston Danes in what looked like a sunroom. Bodies on the floor. Blood on the walls. The acrid smell of gunpowder thick in the air.
"Clear!" Atlas called.
"Clear!" Ethan echoed.
Dad's voice crackled over the radio. "Montana Danes, kitchen. Now."
We moved.
The kitchen was massive—marble counters, stainless steel appliances, a farmhouse sink big enough to bathe in.
Dad stood in the center, shotgun lowered, staring at someone I couldn't see yet.
Then I rounded the corner and saw her.
The woman from the voice. Victoria.
She sat at the kitchen table, cigarette in hand, wrinkled face twisted into something between a smile and a sneer. Four men flanked her, weapons drawn and aimed at my father.
The tension in the room was a living thing.
"Lower your weapons," Dad said quietly.
I didn't move. Neither did my brothers.
"Byron," Atlas said carefully over the comms. "We've got eight down. Cops are two minutes out."
"Lower them," Dad repeated.
Slowly, we complied.
Victoria nodded to her men, and they lowered their weapons as well.
"You look good, Byron," she said, her voice like gravel and smoke. "Much better than you deserve."
Dad just stared at her.
"I thought you were in Portugal," he said finally.
She cackled—a sharp, ugly sound. Her wrinkled face scrunched, bad plastic surgery pulling her skin too tight in all the wrong places.
"That was three husbands ago," she said. "Retirement got boring. Especially when I found out you were still alive."
"This was all a misunderstanding," Dad said. "We had a deal."
Victoria leaned forward, cigarette ash falling onto the pristine marble floor.
"Nothing is ever over," she said. Her eyes burned with disdain. "You owe me a pound of flesh, Byron. And I always collect."
"What happened was a long time ago," Dad said.
"It feels like yesterday," she spat. "Bygones will never be bygones. So, like you did to me, I'll cut and burn each and every one of your hopes and dreams."
"Leave it alone."
"Why should I?" she hissed. "You took everything from me. My operation. My reputation. My life. Now I'm taking yours. Piece by piece. Starting with your sons. Their women. Everyone you've dared to care about."
"You don't have to do this."
"I want to," she said simply.
The sound of sirens filled the air, growing closer.
Victoria tapped ash onto the floor and stood. She was shorter than I expected—bent with age, dressed in expensive clothes that hung wrong on her frame. Bad plastic surgery and worse makeup. She looked like Cruella de Vil on crack and eighty-five years old.
She felt like bitterness in human form.
"I'm leaving now," she said. "And as soon as I walk out that door, the truce is over."
"That's impossible," Dad said.
"Oh?" She smiled, showing yellowed teeth. "Tell that to the FBI who will be here any minute. But as long as we all leave, the whole thing will be swept under the rug."
"And the dead guys?" Dad asked, gesturing to the bodies scattered through the house.
She waved the question away. "Training exercise. I'll have it taken care of. Just lock the door on your way out."
They stood there for a long moment, sirens getting closer, the kitchen thick with unspoken threats.
Finally, Dad nodded begrudgingly and motioned toward the door.
Victoria flicked her cigarette to the ground, crushed it under her heel, and blew him a kiss.
"It was fine seeing you again, Byron," she said. Then, almost as an afterthought: "And one last thing. That question you've had all these years? About Lila? It was me."
Dad tensed.
For a moment, I thought it was going to turn into a battle. My finger tightened on the shotgun trigger.
But Dad didn't move.
Victoria's men followed her out the back door, disappearing into the night.
"Dad," I hissed. "We can't let them go."
He turned to me. There was sadness in his eyes. Deep, endless sadness.
"We have to," he said quietly. "This is my fault. Even more than I thought. And I'll fix it."
We left, then.
Ryker and Marcus stayed behind to intercept the cops—they obviously knew them, greeting them like old friends, badges flashed, official story already in place.
Training exercise. False alarm. Everything's under control. No mention of dead bodies, of course.
The rest of us piled into the SUVs and drove back to Dominion Hall in silence.
When we arrived, I found Dad standing in the front lawn, staring up at the sky.
He looked down when I approached.
There was something in his eyes. Deep regret. Deeper sadness.
"There's one more thing," he said.
I waited.
"What she confirmed," he continued, voice barely above a whisper. "That question I've had for years."
He paused, swallowed hard.
"I don’t know how else to say this, son.” Another pause. Was my father crying? “It was her," he said. "She killed your mother."
The world tilted.
"And that deed," Dad said, his voice hardening into something cold and final, "will not go unpunished."